DWD publishes operational seasonal climate predictions since 2016. In the following years work towards a seamless climate predictions website commenced, with the aim to provide consistent climate predictions across all timescales, focused on the needs of national users.
Today, the DWD climate predictions website www.dwd.de/climatepredictions contains operational decadal and seasonal predictions. Next, we will add post-processed subseasonal prediction products, derived from the IFS forecasts provided by ECMWF, as a further step towards the seamless climate prediction approach.
The user-oriented graphical presentation of the climate predictions is identical over all timescales. It was co-designed with stakeholders from various sectors at user workshops on climate predictions and through surveys and individual user meetings to guarantee its comprehensibility and usability. This co-design always includes the aspect of how the available predictive power is clearly addressed and its limitations are presented in a way that is understandable to users.
As a result, the website offers different layers of information on a basic and an expert level. It includes maps, time series and tables of 1- and 5-year means (decadal) and 3-month means (seasonal) ensemble mean and probabilistic predictions of temperature and precipitation on a global scale and for Europe, Germany, and German regions. For the subseasonal scale, we will add corresponding figures for weekly means of temperature and precipitation.
The information on DWD’s climate predictions website is retrieved from post-processed model output of the German seasonal and decadal prediction systems based on MPI-ESM. A statistical recalibration is applied to improve the skill of decadal climate predictions. It performs a drift correction as well as a lead time dependent optimization of conditional bias and ensemble spread. To fit the needs of German climate data users of a high spatial resolution in Germany (~20 km) and for climate predictions for German cities (based on ~5 km simulations), the empirical-statistical downscaling EPISODES is applied. All predictions are displayed in combination with their skill.
We work on several extensions of the website: multi-year seasonal predictions (e.g. 5-year summer means), the prediction of extreme indices (e.g. drought indices) and El Nino Southern Oscillation predictions. In addition, a seamless time series combining observations, climate predictions and climate projections is in preparation.
How to cite: Mannig, B., Paxian, A., Tivig, M., Pankatz, K., Fröhlich, K., Hoff, A., Reinhardt, K., Isensee, K., Wehring, S., Buchholz, S., Pasternack, A., Lorenz, P., Kreienkamp, F., and Früh, B.: User-tailored climate predictions – the DWD climate predictions website, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-583, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-583, 2022.
